Congestive heart failure (CHF) is a common and growing health problem that affects 5 million Americans, with over 550,000 newly diagnosed cases, 287,000 deaths, and $30 billion in direct and indirect costs yearly. Despite a number of care management programs that are being adopted by private and public payers, CHF patients continue to experience poor outcomes. A potential contributor to these poor outcomes is the presence of depression, present in approximately 20-50% of CHF patients. Similar principles of effective chronic disease management apply to both depression and to CHF. Thus, we suggest that screening CHF patients for depression and then utilizing a single nurse care manager working under a physician's supervision to simultaneously deliver evidence-based treatments for both conditions when present is a novel and potentially more sustainable strategy for improving clinical outcomes than referring depressed CHF patients to separate care providers. Our revised three-year R34 treatment development proposal is responsive to NIMH PAR-06-248, From Intervention Development to Services, as its specific aims are to obtain the necessary feasibility and clinical data required to plan a large-scale R01 trial which will compare the effectiveness of a "blended" depression/CHF care management program with current CHF care management programs in reducing depressive symptoms, improving HRQoL, and various other outcomes of interest. It consists of four coordinated phases: (1) Training;(2) Manual Development;(3) Cohort Study;and (4) Pilot Intervention. We will send nurse-recruiter/care managers from our present NIH-funded trial to treat post-CABG depression for training in two local in-patient and out-patient CHF care management programs. We subsequently will integrate the stepped collaborative care protocols for treating depression we developed in our earlier work with guideline-based protocols for treating CHF. Next, we will conduct a cohort study to estimate recruitment and "usual care" treatment patterns for 372 depressed and 100 non-depressed CHF patients. ROC analyses will be applied so as to estimate suitably sensitive and specific PHQ-9 cut-off scores for identifying depressed patients who are likely to die or become rehospitalized at 6-month follow-up. Finally, we will pilot our telephone-based "blended" collaborative care strategy to 30 depressed CHF patients to further refine our treatment strategy.